HP,Altiris Group

For those users migrating to a Hardware Independent Image, there are many "gotchas" that can slow you down. Getting one of the many tools available to help institute this process is a good start. Below is some information as this relates to HP Desktops and Laptops.

We've had a lot of success using the HII Tool provided by CondorMan here: http://www.symantec.com/connect/node/648 While this has made our life easier, the documentation is somewhat lacking as to customizing this tool. And the drivers collect feature, while very useful, gathered mostly the usual PCI type drivers such as video, NIC, and audio.

We started noticing newer HP computers, especially laptops, were starting to carry unusual drivers, including those requiring the Microsoft UAA driver (mostly Audio and modem), along with "special" HP drivers that covered items like Quick Launch buttons, Protect Tools, Bluetooth, and the HP Mobile Data Protection sensor. These unique, non-PCI drivers would appear in the Device Manager as "Unknown" and their Vendor IDs have unusual names like:

In our variety of HP computers platforms, we have to get our unified image to work on all of them. For the older computers such as the NC6230, this is pretty straight forward. The hardest part is to get a working Sysprep, and extracting the drivers into the correct folders on the Deployment Server by either using the Driver Collect feature, a manuel process, or another tool like WinDriverGhost, along with using the sysprepmsd.inf file that is created by the driver collect tool, to update your sysprep answer file under the Mass Storage section. We used our regular sysprep file, and bypassed the instructions for creating a new sysprep, except for one key change.

By design or by accident, the one part of the sysprep section of documentation in the HII Tool instructions we changed called for the OemPnPDriversPath to be named drv\1 through drv\140. Obviously, most computers only use roughly 20 of these folders. This puzzled us for awhile but decided that the remaining 120 folders must have some purpose.

Our solution to the unique HP drivers was to modify the "Prepare Drivers for destination Computer" script that runs in WINPE right after the image is laid down. By utilizing the xcopy feature, we force the unique drivers to copy into drv\140, 139, 138, and 137 by creating these drivers (Protect Tools, Quick Launch, etc) in newly created folders under .HII\WINXP\Drivers on the Deployment Server, along with PCI, PCMCIA, and USB folders which are automatically created.

By copying these drivers down to a client machine, the destination computer can find the unique drivers it needs in these folders when it boots up, along with the usual PCI drivers it needs, leaving your device manager in Windows nice and clean. For example, we use the new HP 6910p; this unit not only has a high definition modem and Audio, which won't install under the normal process, but also has a host of Protect Tool and Mobile Data protection drivers, that will also cause the "New Device Found" error message to pop up on a newly imaged computer.

The steps below and can modified to your needs, but allows this very useful tool to grow and expand with your platform environment.

Here are the steps:

1. Identify which HP computer drivers you know will not install with the baseline tool.
2. Create new folder(s) under HII\WINXP\DRIVERS\ you can name these whatever you want.
3. Download the appropriate Softpaqs from the HP website, and extract into the folders
4. Note that the drivers need to be in the root of the folders, just like any other driver folder on the DS
5. Clone (copy) the Distribute Hardware Independent Image job on the Deployment Server
6. Within the pasted new job Modify the Prepare Drivers for Destination Computer script with the folder names you created.

Below is the entire script, our customizations are the last five lines.

(Please note this example uses the SDMax, Conexant, and Realtek drivers and folders we created, your environment may differ.)

REM Copy Driver, HAL, and OEM files to production
@echo off
REM For DOS & WinPE support, we try to run both versions. One will work, the other won't.

REM Delete AClient.cfg if it exists
.\rdeploy\dos\firm delete prod:\aclient.cfg
.\rdeploy\windows\firm delete prod:\aclient.cfg

echo Copying Driver files...
.\rdeploy\dos\firm -recurse copy .\Temp\%ID%\drv prod:\drv
.\rdeploy\windows\firm -recurse copy .\Temp\%ID%\drv prod:\drv

echo Copying HAL files...
.\rdeploy\dos\firm -recurse copy .\Temp\%ID%\system32 prod:\WINDOWS\System32
.\rdeploy\windows\firm -recurse copy .\Temp\%ID%\system32 prod:\WINDOWS\System32

echo Copying OEM files...
.\rdeploy\dos\firm -recurse copy .\Sysprep\i386 prod:\Sysprep\i386
.\rdeploy\windows\firm -recurse copy .\Sysprep\i386 prod:\Sysprep\i386

REM Prepare Drivers for destination computer according to hardware profile
.\HII\DriverPrep.exe .\Temp\%ID%.pmq .\HII\WINXP .\Temp\%ID% > .\HII\Logs\DriverPrep-%ID%.log

xcopy /y  /e .\HII\WINXP\Drivers\New Folder\Realtek .\Temp\%ID%\drv\140\ >> .\HII\Logs\DriverPrep-%ID%.log
xcopy /y  /e .\HII\WINXP\Drivers\HDAUDIO\Conexant .\Temp\%ID%\drv\139\ >> .\HII\Logs\DriverPrep-%ID%.log
xcopy /y  /e .\HII\WINXP\Drivers\HDAUDIO\SDMAX .\Temp\%ID%\drv\138\ >> .\HII\Logs\DriverPrep-%ID%.log
xcopy /y  /e .\HII\WINXP\Drivers\Laptop .\Temp\%ID%\drv\137\ >> .\HII\Logs\DriverPrep-%ID%.log